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Friday, March 28, 2014

Classic Album Review: The Cure - Seventeen Seconds (1980)

This
is the first of five classic album posts featuring the work of The Cure ... all
written a while back, and I’ll post them to the blog in chronological order:

Every
avid music fan has a special place in their collection for a select number of
albums they’d consider all-time favourites. No two all-time lists would ever be
identical because taste is such a subjective, personal, and often intimate
thing.

If
ever I was attempting to compile any such list of personal Desert Island
Delights, Seventeen Seconds is just as likely to be one of those albums sitting
right near the very top. And I guess for me, that’s been the case for more than
30 years now. This, despite the fact that many of the band’s hardcore fans are
unlikely to rate Seventeen Seconds as their “chosen one”. Yep, taste is a very
personal and intimate thing indeed. As Robert Smith himself suggests on the
excellent ‘Play For Today’ ... “it's not a case of doing what's right, it's
just the way I feel that matters, tell me I'm wrong, I don't really care ...”

Having
been seriously impressed when Faith came out in 1981, I worked my way back
through the then not-so-extensive (at that point) Cure back catalogue and
Seventeen Seconds quickly established itself as the benchmark by which I would
judge all future Cure releases.

Through
the years I’ve found myself returning to it and it never lets me down. For me,
it captures perfectly the headspace I found myself dwelling in back in those
late teenage post-punk years of 1980 thru to 1983, and although any rational
sane person may consider such a notion pretty unhealthy, it remains a period of
my life that I just can’t let go. Just another one of those boring “soundtrack
of my youth” … “best days of my life” scenarios - call it a time, place, and
had to be there, thing.

And
how many seriously deranged (or otherwise) post-pubescent Gothboy-wannabees
could relate to the words contained within the album’s finest moment ‘A Forest’
… “come closer and see, see into the trees, find the girl, while you can ... come
closer and see, see into the dark, just follow your eyes, just follow your eyes
…”

And
to give Smith his due - he got the next bit right as well - the girl was NEVER
there, and yes siree, it was ALWAYS the same …“running towards nothing, again
and again and again and again …”

From
the experimental atmospheric instrumentals (of sorts - they’re rather more like
interludes) ‘A Reflection’ and ‘The Final Sound’ through to the classic
simplicity and repetition of ‘In Your House’, ‘Play For Today’, ‘M’, and
‘Secrets’, this is a finely crafted piece of work. Then there is, as mentioned
above, the utter and total genius of the band’s seminal work ‘A Forest’; hugely
influential, often copied, frequently covered, but never bettered.

It
is often said that familiarity ultimately leads to contempt; in the case of
Seventeen Seconds the opposite applies. That familiarity takes me to the sort
of comfortable warm zone seldom found amid dark, stark, and otherwise obscure
surrounds. Each to their own, but this is a back-of-the-hand album, I know
every last chord change, each and every nuance in Smith’s burgeoning voice;
conscious nor subconscious anticipation of either never wears thin.

The
2005 Deluxe Edition CD release – at least my third such copy of the album
through the years, but my first on disc – contains a bonus CD which features
different versions of the tracks, live versions, alternate takes, home demos of
non-album material, rare ‘Cult Hero’ stuff from the band’s earliest incarnation
– but to be honest, none of it could be considered “essential listening”
regardless of how collectable it may once have been. I was a little
disappointed with some of the sound quality on the bonus CD – I really wanted a
definitive version of ‘Another Journey By Train’ (an instrumental b-side of
some repute) but found the demo on this distorted and muddy. Still, that must
be considered only a minor complaint, and it takes nothing away from how I feel
about the original album as a whole.